Young Justice’s Identity Crisis Darkens TV Toonscape

It limped lamely out of soap opera early last season, but Young Justice eventually caught superheroic heat, thanks to darkly philosophical explorations of identity politics and even artificial intelligence. It’s somewhat upped that critical ante its second season, whose latest episode “Agendas” (above) airs Saturday morning, just in time to mess with so-called children’s programming.

The episode follows Superboy, Young Justice’s brooding hunk-borg, back to the technocratic madhouse Project Cadmus, which has created another Super Clone just like him. That existential dissonance has cropped up in Young Justice before, because it’s a stellar metafiction: How else are you going to separate the paragon Superman apart from all the literal clones — Superboy, Supergirl, Krypto! — that the comics industry threw into his wake?

You turn him into a sullen superhero with a deadbeat dad, that’s how.

That crafty inversion interestingly rewrites other underwhelming characters as well in Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti‘s increasingly impressive series. Last week’s aptly named episode “Image” (viewable below) dragged teenage martian Miss Martian through a harrowing psychic identity crisis that thankfully annihilated her annoying “Hello, Megan!” catch-phrase and disposition. It once lamely filled the saccharine alien girl archetype left behind by the equally cool Teen Titans‘ Starfire, who has since become a porn star in The New 52. In Young Justice, it has become a sinister televisual image that the shapeshifting Miss Martian has adopted to hide her comparatively monstrous real self.

The fact that it’s only monstrous if you’re not from Mars is one intellectual axis upon which Miss Martian’s identity crisis turns, and one Weisman and Vietti will hopefully explore later. The fact that she’s overly worried about a cyborg like Superboy, her love interest in Young Justice, actually caring about such things is also a unique opportunity for cerebral storytelling, for all ages, that they hopefully won’t pass by. The fact that Superboy enjoyed Miss Martian shapeshifting into Black Canary before making out is, well, problematic.

But these are good problems to have for intelligent animation that seems to cross demographics each season. It’s unclear whether its bright new Saturday morning slot is wise for a show offering such dark tones and thematic explorations. And it’s easy to imagine more than a few Hello Kitty watchers fleeing to the panic room as Miss Martian is horrifically stripped to her Martian core in “Image.” The jury is still out on whether Young Justice can find a middle ground between its polarized teen females, who are either sunny cheerleader clones like Miss Martian or surly sulkers like Artemis lost in a clubhouse of goofy dudes.

And that’s way before we get to Young Justice’s geopolitical thicket, starring the terrorist Qurac as a lazy stand-in for our real-time Middle East (below). Or Batman’s troubling habit of using his alter ego, and superheroic teenage strike team (also below), to manipulate world affairs.

But, again, these are good problems to have for an animation series. Let’s hope they are solved with more forethought than we’re used to in the real world.

Young Justice airs Saturdays 10 a.m. as part of DC Nation’s hour-long block.

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